Tragedy and resilience: How Squirrel Hill found healing in its darkest hour

Mark Oppenheimer remembers exactly where he was when he heard about the deadly mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018.

He was in his car outside Temple Emanuel in Newton, Massachusetts, where he had just taken his eldest daughter to the bat mitzvah of her camp friend. When he checked his phone a little after one o’clock that day, his screen was full of anxious messages from friends and family.

“Did you hear about Pittsburgh?” “Do you know anyone in Pittsburgh?” “Are you going to Pittsburgh?”

Oppenheimer’s experience that afternoon was similar to that of Jews nationwide. Across the country, people checked in with loved ones after hearing that, earlier that morning, a gunman had entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood and murdered 11 congregants during a morning service. The victims spanned ages 54 to 97.

It was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States.

For his new book, “Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood,” Oppenheimer, a lecturer in English in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, interviewed about 250 people in this community. The book captures the tragic events of that day and its aftermath, the community-derived resilience of this tight-knit, historically Jewish community, and how this resilience made it uniquely positioned to recover from the attack.

This was evident in the days following the shooting, when residents and non-residents, Jews and gentiles alike, rallied to support the community in creative ways.

Many fundraised for victim’s families, synagogue repairs, and therapy. Some painted murals in the local Starbucks; others baked pies. A graphic designer created the “Stronger Than Hate” graphic. One man, known for arriving after tragedies with crosses painted with victims’ names, traveled to Squirrel Hill, and instead of building crosses, built Stars of David, hand-painted with the victims’ names.

These acts speak to the “hesed” (“loving-kindness” in Hebrew) present in Squirrel Hill as the community rallied after the attack, Oppenheimer said. In fact, he said, there might have been “no place in America better positioned to endure it.”

“Squirrel Hill has built-in advantages,” said Oppenheimer, who is also coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative. “It’s geographically tight-knit, dense, and walkable. People live near other people. They're not isolated. This means people naturally get out of their houses and bump into other people, have serendipitous meetings, and get hugs.”

After the attack, people outside the community would try to provide support as well. Schools would send buses of students, synagogues would convene mission trips, and “trauma tourists,” as Oppenheimer described them, would flood the quiet streets of Squirrel Hill.

Trauma tourism is not unique to Squirrel Hill. Communities that experienced similar tragedies like Newtown, Parkland, and Columbine also received an outpouring of attention. Sometimes this external attention raised privacy and security concerns for the victims’ families.

While some outside support was appreciated in Pittsburgh, many wanted to mourn and heal with other residents, not tourists, Oppenheimer said. Indeed, since Squirrel Hill is one of the oldest, most stable Jewish communities in the world, they didn’t necessarily need external support.

“There is a lot of social capital there that people can draw on in times of need,” he said.

At one point, Nina Butler, a member of one of Squirrel Hill’s two Jewish burial societies, in response to groups contacting her about traveling to Squirrel Hill, begged, “We are the warmest, most welcoming community in the country. Please, please don’t come.”

“One lesson I learned was that you should always try to figure out what the community needs and wants,” said Oppenheimer. “Helping people is about meeting their needs, not your own needs to feel useful.”

While some communities that experience tragedy never returned to normalcy, Squirrel Hill was able to achieve normalcy eventually, likely due to the resilience of its Jewish community, Oppenheimer said.

“I think that Squirrel Hill did a very good job,” he said. “Not that the episode will ever be forgotten, but the goal of healing is to get back to as normal as possible and to resume your lives. They did a really remarkable job of doing that.”